A SIP-Based Network QoS Provisioning Framework for Cloud-Hosted DDS Applications

The growing trend towards running publish/subscribe (pub/sub)-based distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems in cloud environments motivates the need to achieve end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) over wide-area networks (WANs). The OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a data-centric middleware that provides fast, scalable and predictable distribution of real-time critical data. The DDS standard, however, provides QoS control mechanisms that are confined only to the middleware residing at end-systems, which makes it hard to support DRE pub/sub systems over WANs. A promising solution to this problem is to integrate DDS with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is an IP-based signaling protocol that supports real-time applications involving voice, video, and multimedia sessions via the QoS mechanisms in IP networks. This paper describes our approach to bridge the SIP protocol and DDS to realize DDS-based applications over QoS-enabled IP WANs by overcoming both inherent and accidental complexities in their integration. An exemplar of the proposed approach for IP DiffServ networks is described, which uses the Common Open Policy Server (COPS) protocol to assure QoS for cloud-hosted DRE pub/sub applications. To distinguish the DDS traffic from other best-effort traffic in the cloud environment, our approach uses the COPS-DRA protocol as a generic protocol for automatic service-level negotiation and the integration of this protocol in an overall QoS management architecture to manage service levels over multiple domains deploying different QoS technologies.